Re: create reflog for reflog-less ref

[Jeff King <peff@peff.net>]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 11:18:39PM -0800, Chris Jerdonek wrote:

> Thanks for the suggestions both of you. I didn't know about "always."
> It looks like it was added in 2.12.0:
> https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNotes/2.12.0.txt#L129
> 
> After experimenting a bit more, I seem to be finding that--
> 
> * The "one-shot" `-c core.logAllRefUpdates=always` approach only seems
> to work with git-update-ref if you're *changing* the SHA with
> update-ref, and
> * Passing `--create-reflog` also seems to work like the one-shot
> config approach (again, as long as you're changing the SHA).
> 
> I feel like these options are still wanting.. If you want to add a
> missing reflog without changing the ref, these approaches still seem
> to require you to temporarily change it to something different (as did
> the delete-create approach I stated in my first email). It would be
> nice to be able to create (or append to) the reflog without having to
> change where the ref is pointing. Or maybe I'm missing a variation
> that will do this..

No, I don't think there is a variation that will do that. You'd have to
wait for the next update.

The "touch" trick I showed would work for that, but it's not going to be
portable going forward. I don't think it would be a bad idea to have
some way of triggering a "noop" reflog update via update-ref, where we
either create the reflog as empty, or insert a pointless entry going
from the current sha1 to itself. But AFAIK that doesn't exist right now.

-Peff